Majd was the fourth of Hafiz al-Assad’s five children. He was born a year after Bashar al-Assad and two years before Maher. The first family of Syria went to great lengths to protect his privacy. Little is known about the president’s younger brother. Most news reports about him are brief or inaccurate.

By all accounts, Majed had a difficult and troubled life. From early youth, he showed signs of instability, erratic behavior, and a propensity for depression, despite having a reputedly warm relationship with his father.

He began to self-medicate from an early age, experimenting with narcotics and quickly became dependent. The family struggled to help Majd. His brothers sought to end relationships with a string of hangers on who enabled his bad habits and indulged his weaknesses. For a period in the mid 1990s, he was hospitalized in London, in an effort to break his substance abuse. Bashar al-Assad visited him regularly there and oversaw his care. Numerous efforts to intervene on his behalf and develop a constructive environment around him that might have relieved his periods of depression failed.

Majd is survived by his wife, Ru’a Ayyoub, who was born in 1976 and graduated in business and economics from Tishriin University in Latakia. They had no children.

Majd al-Assad will be buried in Qardaha in the family mausoleum next to his father (d. 2000) and brother Basil (d. 1994) following afternoon prayers on Sunday 13/12/2009.

Al-Assad Mausoleum in Qardaha where Basil was buried in 1994 and Hafiz was buried in 2000